Then Shall Ye Return

 All scripture references, unless otherwise noted, are from the King James Version of the Holy Bible.

Malachi chapter 3 ends with the words, "Then shall ye return, and discern between the righteous and the wicked, between him that serveth God and him that serveth him not." When we went through a tough time in our lives God impressed this passage of scripture on me. For a long time before and after I have tried to keep our lives together as my family sought to serve God. It all started while we were pastoring the church in Aberdeen, South Dakota. We had been there for just short of seven years and I was extremely homesick for the west coast. I wanted to leave Aberdeen due to what I considered hardships we were undergoing. In James 4:13-15 the Bible says, "Go to now, ye that say, To day or to morrow we will go into such a city, and continue there a year, and buy and sell, and get gain: whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away. For that ye ought to say, If the Lord will, we shall live, and do this, or that." Needless to say I wanted the will of God in any move we might make and so I prayed that we might be released from the Aberdeen pastorate. 

God did answer my prayer, He said if I chose to resign the church He would bless me. If I chose to keep pastoring the church in Aberdeen He would bless me. Either way the choice was mine to make. I didn't like the answer. I guess I wanted God to be the director of all my steps, (see Psalm 37:23-24). Little did I know that if I chose to leave the Aberdeen church the trouble we would face down the line. But the choice was mine to make and mine alone. About six weeks later I made the choice to resign the church in Aberdeen. 

I had every intention of returning to the west coast It was on Sunday night that I resigned the church and on Monday, the next day, I received a phone call from a pastor friend  in a neighboring state. He advised me that a church in that state had just come open and that I should try out for it. I was a little dumbfounded as he could not have known of the previous night's decision to resign the Aberdeen church. I took this as the direction that God wanted me to go. We tried out for it and was voted in with a virtual unanimous vote. I felt pretty good! We were there for about nine weeks. 

It was at the end of that pastorate that the scripture in Malachi 3:18 was impressed on my mind. (I won't go into the trouble we faced, but suffice it to say that it was through no fault of my own or of my family that it lasted such a short time). As I said in a previous post, "You can't go wrong believing the Word of God." Let me suggest to you who might read this post, If you have never turned away from your sins, do so today. Find someone to baptize you in Jesus precious name, (it is the only name that can save you according to Acts 4:12). And allow God to fill you with the Holy Ghost. (You will speak in a heavenly language, see John 3:8).